Looking (past tense looked)

The looking action describes the player's current room and any visible items, but is made more complicated by the problem of visibility. Inform calculates this by dividing the room into visibility levels. For an actor on the floor of a room, there is only one such level: the room itself. But an actor sitting on a chair inside a packing case which is itself on a gantry would have four visibility levels: chair, case, gantry, room. The looking rules use a special phrase, 'the visibility-holder of X', to go up from one level to the next: thus the visibility-holder of the case is the gantry.

The 'visibility level count' is the number of levels which the player can actually see, and the 'visibility ceiling' is the uppermost visible level. For a player standing on the floor of a lighted room, this will be a count of 1 with the ceiling set to the room. But a player sitting on a chair in a closed opaque packing case would have visibility level count 2, and visibility ceiling equal to the case. Moreover, light has to be available in order to see anything at all: if the player is in darkness, the level count is 0 and the ceiling is nothing.

Finally, note that several actions other than looking also produce room descriptions in some cases. The most familiar is going, but exiting a container or getting off a supporter will also generate a room description. (The phrase used by the relevant rules is 'produce a room description with going spacing conventions' and carry out or report rules for newly written actions are welcome to use this too if they would like to. The spacing conventions affect paragraph division, and note that the main description paragraph may be omitted for a place not newly visited, depending on the VERBOSE settings.) Room descriptions like this are produced by running the check, carry out and report rules for looking, but are not subject to before, instead or after rules: so they do not count as a new action. The looking variable 'room-describing action' holds the action name of the reason a room description is currently being made: if the player typed LOOK, this will indeed be set to the looking action, but if we're describing a room just reached by GO EAST, say, it will be set to the going action. This can be used to customise carry out looking rules so that different forms of description are used on going to a room as compared with looking around while already there.

Typed commands leading to this action

"look/l"

Named values belonging to this action

room-describing action - action name

abbreviated form allowed - truth state

visibility level count - number

visibility ceiling - object

Rules controlling this action

set action variables for    looking  determine visibility ceiling rule    name  unlist

carry out    declare everything unmentioned rule    name  unlist

carry out    room description heading rule    name  unlist   3

carry out    room description body text rule    name  unlist   1

carry out    room description paragraphs about objects rule    name  unlist

carry out    check new arrival rule    name  unlist

report    an actor looking  other people looking rule    name  unlist   1